Huawei plans to ship up to 60m smart phones
this year

China- based Huawei, a lead­ing global in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy ( ICT) so­lu­tions provider, which has a strate­gic part­ner­ship with re­gional telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions ma­jor eti­salat to roll out the ad­vanced fourth gen­er­a­tion long-term evo­lu­tion fre­quency-division du­plex­ing (4G LTE-FDD) net­work in the UAE and to bring 85 per cent of the coun­try un­der the net­work in 2013, says it plans to ship up to 60 mil­lion smart phones this year.

"About 35 per cent of this, would be con­sumed in China. We were num­ber 4 in An­droid phones last year and this year, aim to be num­ber 3 in the world," Shao Yang, CMO, De­vice at Huawei told vis­it­ing re­porters from the UAE at a man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­ity in a re­cent in­ter­ac­tion. "Our smart phone ship­ment was 20 mil­lion in 2011 and 3 mil­lion in 2010."

He said be­fore 2011, Huawei was known as a lowend phone maker but since then, that per­cep­tion has rad­i­cally changed.

Shao said Huawei cur­rently has over 50 per cent in the global mo­bile broad­band mar­ket. "We are aim­ing to be the world's top three phone brands by 2016," said Shao, adding Huawei's Gold se­ries, Win­dows 8 de­vice is set for a global launch at Las Ve­gas in Jan­uary 2013, which would have fea­tures like longer bat­tery life. "Our prod­ucts are avail­able through op­er­a­tors, on the open mar­ket and through e-com­merce," said Shao.

Huawei an­nu­ally in­vests an av­er­age of 10 per cent of its rev­enue into re­search and de­vel­op­ment (R&D). It aims to be the No. 3 smart­phone ven­dor in the world with 15 per cent mar­ket share by 2015.

The Mid­dle East is one of the fastest grow­ing re­gions world­wide for Huawei with re­gional con­tract sales across the Mid­dle East in 2011 to­talling $3.22 bil­lion, a 20 per cent in­crease from the pre­vi­ous year.